Vitold Byalynitsky-Birulya

Biography

In a 1912 photograph by Karl Fischer, the two figures on the far left are the painters Alexander Moravov and Vitold Byalynitsky-Birulya. The hunters had killed three bears and are presenting them as a gift to James Lowther, Speaker of the British House of Commons. Byalynitsky-Birulya was a passionate hunter; by one count he killed more than forty bears.

He was born on 31 January (12 February) 1872 in the village of Krynki in Mogilev Governorate, into the family of a small tenant farmer.

The family moved often. His father worked for the Dnieper shipping company and took the boy with him on voyages along the Dnieper, the Pripyat and the Sozh. For a while Vitold lived in Kiev with his elder brother Alexander and attended the cadet corps, then moved to Nikolai Murashko’s drawing school, where he spent 1885–1889. At seventeen he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and studied under Sergei Korovin, Vasily Polenov and Illarion Pryanishnikov. In Moscow he met Isaac Levitan and worked in his studio. He took up landscape under his teachers’ influence, and as early as 1892 Pavel Tretyakov bought his canvas “From the Environs of Pyatigorsk” for his gallery. The painter was twenty.

After that his career climbed the steps usual for a landscape painter of the time. From 1897 he exhibited with the Moscow Society of Art Lovers, the Moscow Association of Artists and at international exhibitions, and from 1899 his name appears in the catalogues of the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) exhibitions. “Eternal Snows” won a gold medal at the Caucasian Jubilee Exhibition of 1901. In 1904 he was admitted to the Association of the Peredvizhniki, and in 1908 he received the title of Academician of painting. He was also a member of the Union of Russian Artists and of the Kuindzhi Society of Artists. In 1911 “Hour of Silence” brought him an honorary medal in Munich and a bronze in Barcelona.

That same year, 1911, he painted “Winter Sleep”, which earned another bronze medal in Barcelona. The composition is built from a few planes and a small number of lines: a church in the centre, its silhouette set against the sky, the brushwork barely visible, everything veiled in the haze of deepening dusk. I think it is his boldest work: very little is drawn, and the mood rests on shades of colour.

In 1912 Byalynitsky-Birulya bought a plot on the shore of Lake Udomlya in Tver Governorate, not far from places where Levitan had often worked, and built a house with a studio there. He named the estate Chaika (“The Seagull”). The lake and its surroundings gave him motifs for decades to come, and much of his life is bound up with Chaika itself. After the revolution the estate was left to the artist as personal property, and members of the party and the government came there to hunt. In 1917 he set up an art school for peasant children.

In 1922 he joined the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. In Soviet years Byalynitsky-Birulya carried on the line of the lyrical landscape of the late nineteenth century and became one of the creators of the memorial landscape, views of places associated with famous people. In 1936 he brought back a series of paintings from Pushkin’s Mikhailovskoye and Trigorskoye, then showed landscapes of Tchaikovsky’s estate at Klin, and painted Gorki Leninskiye, Gori and Yasnaya Polyana. In the 1920s and 1930s he travelled widely around the country: he was interested in the Gigant state farm, the Seybit commune, the construction of Azovstal and the development of the North, and in 1933, 1935 and 1937 he visited the Arctic and brought back several series. For the Siberia pavilion at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition he made sketches for the panels “Omsk” and “Chelyabinsk”, each twenty-five metres by three; they were painted by the artist I. S. Blokhin. In 1937 he received the title of Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR. He marked the war with the paintings “The Red Army in the Forests of Karelia” and “In the Tracks of the Fascist Barbarians” (1942).

In 1944 he became a People’s Artist of the Byelorussian SSR, and in 1947 a People’s Artist of the RSFSR and a full member of the USSR Academy of Arts. From May to mid-June 1947 he lived at the Belaya Dacha near Minsk and painted several dozen studies there, from which grew a cycle devoted to Byelorussia. The motif for the painting “Belarus. Spring Has Blossomed Again” was also found near Minsk.

Byalynitsky-Birulya died in Moscow on 18 June 1957, aged 85, and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery. He left about two thousand paintings and studies. The Tretyakov Gallery holds “From the Environs of Pyatigorsk”, “Spring” (1911), “The Ice Has Gone” (1930), “Pensive Days of Autumn” (1932–1942), “Nivoges” (1936–1937) and “Belarus. Spring Has Blossomed Again” (1947); more than four hundred and fifty works are in Belarus, including the museums named after him in Mogilev and Byalynichy. On the site of the Krynki manor farm where he was born, by the Drut River, stands a memorial sign.